Haotian

I read through Lao Bai’s interview carefully, and the information density and knowledge capacity were severely overloaded. My head was buzzing after I finished. I’ll extract a few viewpoints that resonate with the same frequency and share them:

1）Don’t deny this industry because so many projects have died in the Crypto space. DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, prediction markets, and so on—some projects will die, but there will always be projects that ultimately survive, and it will keep getting better. At its core, the programmable financial kernel behind traits like blockchain decentralization, permissionless access, and censorship resistance has real peer-to-peer value transfer utility that matters, even if not many people pay attention.

2）The failure of tokenomics models has had a bigger impact on the Crypto industry than people imagined. At least in most people’s impression, the coin-world has largely been driven by wealth-building effects supported by continuous “new token issuance” expectations. Without newly issued native assets, relying only on TradFi’s existing assets, the industry will lose its appeal to the Build side—VCs, developers, project teams, and others. Consumer-side retail investors alone can’t sustain it.

3）Crypto has brought stablecoins and perpetual contracts into the traditional finance world, and it has already proven its industry value. Whether it’s the political urgency of dollar-denominated debt or the high efficiency of innovative financial instruments like Perps, these benefits come from Crypto. But before the stablecoin market reaches the scale of trillions and before US stock institutions truly price Perps on-platform, everything is still too early.
$HYPE
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4）The Agentic Economy is definitely going to happen—and it will be the final form presented by the AI + Crypto narrative. But the process of building infra like agent wallets, agent trading, x402, Agent Chain, and the like will be painful. Crypto can only find edge-case differentiated opportunities under the dominant guidance of web2’s traditional institutions—but honestly, that may be enough.

ai16z is finally dead.

With a stack of legal troubles, with many technical goals that were never realized, of course—and with the heartfelt expectations of tens of millions of retail investors. @shawmakesmagic actually claimed that a token was not sold. And because it couldn’t win the case, it ended up handing over all the remaining Treasury funds in a settlement. It’s absurd. If it’s going to die, then let it die—but without even the last shred of dignity.

As one of the witnesses, I experienced ai16z’s glory, and watched it decline little by little through repeated struggles and flailing. At this moment, my heart is filled with mixed feelings. One sentence keeps circling in my mind:

ai16z may die, but that era of “on-chain innovation” fanaticism—please stop.

Come, let’s pull the timeline back to the end of 2024 for a moment and remember:

1) Back then, AI MEMEs like Goat, act, ai16z, Fartcoin—just about any of them—could easily surge to a market cap height of 1B+. So many MEMEs rode the winds of momentum. Every day on-chain brought new opportunities, new wealth passwords, and retail investors partied along with it.

2) Back then, the Eliza framework was open-sourced. A large number of plugins flooded in crazily. Hundreds or even thousands of people chased the GitHub to contribute—endless forks, PRs, and all kinds of innovation experiments. Don’t think it was only gamblers watching candlesticks to make money. Truly, there were developers burning the midnight oil writing code, doing interesting innovation experiments, rushing in to do something for this brand-new narrative at the frontier of AI agents.

3) Back then, web2AI was still in the model performance arms race. GPT-4o and Sonnet 3.5 were still mainstream. There was no MCP, no x402, no A2A, not even OpenClaw or Moltbook. There was also no concept of agent applications—but in the Crypto space, a wave of AI full-stack innovation had already been launched with forward-looking ambition. Experiments one after another: agents building wallets for themselves, agents doing Trading, agents adapting to chains, and even agents constructing social networks. That was truly an on-chain innovation era where if you had a dream, you dared to make it real.

...Enough reminiscing. The more I say, the more it brings tears.

Finally, one last emphasis: this is not only a little piece of mourning for ai16z, but I also hope it can rekindle a brand-new spark for those old dreams of on-chain innovation in Crypto.
🔥

In a moment, I’ll chat with everyone here about some information in the RWA industry—please stay tuned.

If you want to keep eating from the Crypto bowl, you gotta understand these truths:

1) Looking back at past cycles, the crypto industry nearly dies every round before rebirth. It’s normal to see drops of 90%, 80%, or even 70% before a V-shaped recovery takes off. High volatility is definitely part of the game, but don’t forget, the resilience to bounce back is strong; it’s not going anywhere.

2) CEX exchanges have never been the saviors of the crypto space; in some ways, they don’t even belong to the crypto world. The 'fees' taken by trading platforms are eternal, regardless of whether the assets traded are major cryptocurrencies, MEME coins, or even stocks, futures, oil, and precious metals.

3) There are indeed many VC projects in this cycle that seem like 'scams', but ultimately, what will pull the crypto industry out of its slump will be grand narratives. Just like the DeFi boom of 2020, the NFT craze of 2022, the inscriptions of 2023, and the Agents of 2024. The continuity and depth of these narratives determine the strength of the bull market and the difficulty of rebuilding after the bubble bursts. Without 'innovative narratives', the crypto industry simply can't thrive.

4) Twitter CT is overflowing with a lot of FOMO-driven, sharp-tongued, or oppositional voices. This is really just a reflection of the poor secondary market conditions. Just take a look and have a laugh. When the day comes that the crypto industry faces a catastrophic decline, no one will be able to stand alone. As the saying goes, dear 'stock traders', please do respect the road you’ve traveled.

5) Those who have benefited or early OGs, some have retreated into the shadows, others are scheming behind the scenes, while some are still stubbornly preaching the gospel. This isn’t what’s scary; what’s terrifying is that most people choose to remain 'silent'. The cost of silence will inevitably lead to 'bad money driving out good', and the resulting erosion of 'consensus' is what could be most fatal for the industry.

$ZEC's current biggest challenge is getting stuck in a 'no clear answer' dilemma:

1) It's unclear whether its Orchard privacy pool has truly suffered a 'hack' over the past four years, and even if it did, there's no proof that this was a meticulously crafted 'infinite mint' backdoor by the team;

2) Assuming it was actually 'attacked', it's unclear how the hacker managed to double-spend ZEC to extract real value from the Orchard pool, because if they could bypass the Turnstile's total supply verification, it means they could only quietly 'consume' a bit at a time, using fake ZEC to slowly purchase real services like merchants, VPNs, gift cards, etc. This kind of hidden damage isn't as obvious as a massive coin theft, but it effectively overdraws the value that all ZEC holders should rightfully enjoy;

3) Even if Shielded Labs is about to roll out a new upgrade that incorporates a new privacy pool and enhanced Turnstile accounting and mathematical proofs, it can only prove that the effective supply of the current Orchard pool is less than the total amount that has entered the pool. It still doesn't clarify whether there will be potential vulnerabilities discovered in the future, because the contradiction between verifiable supply and privacy inherently exists. This will directly erode the trust built over years in the Zcash privacy service market; 'privacy' isn't an issue, but 'verifiable supply' has become ZEC's deadlock.

Let's talk about @binance launching tokenized trading for US stocks:

1) Simply defining it as 'daring to be the first in the world' doesn’t really mean much. From Coinbase to Binance, OKX, and a bunch of smaller exchanges, everyone’s got a vision for super financial infrastructure. As investors, diversifying channels is key, and trading stocks, commodities futures, and prediction markets is just a matter of time.

So, Binance will have to dive in sooner or later; it’s just a question of how much expectation they can handle.

2) In the short term, anyone with a bit of true crypto spirit isn’t exactly cheering for this, because exchanges bringing in TradFi and other financial assets might seem like it could 'bring in new users'—attracting those who want to trade US stocks but face high barriers. However, it could also drain liquidity from crypto.

At least in the current market atmosphere, this is an unavoidable consequence. So, in the short term, the tokenization of US stocks is actually a temporary bearish signal.

3) However, the lack of appeal for native crypto assets and the liquidity drain from US stocks aren't directly related. Exchanges shouldn’t abandon their strategy of building comprehensive trading platforms just to protect on-site liquidity.

It’s just that attracting new users and old money could clash with trading models, fee structures, and product experiences, which might not fit well, and importantly, they won’t contribute much to platform revenue.

Thus, finding ways to channel new users and funds back into the native crypto industry will likely require a lot of products and innovations, but the overall 'bullish' transmission chain will be pretty long.

4) Even though the transmission chain is long, the upside is that this kind of infrastructure upgrade will stimulate the native crypto ecosystem through TradFi integration. This includes the expansion of stablecoin volumes and the collaborative compatibility with innovative DeFi protocols, especially driving narratives like RWAFi and Agentic Economy.

In other words, the fermentation and implementation of pure native crypto narratives won’t be completely disrupted; instead, fresh blood entering the scene will force the breeding of innovation within the ecosystem. After all, exchanges are the most sensitive and proactive when it comes to protecting user loyalty and liquidity lifelines.